He pretends to ignore the other passengers, who look rich, or at least no poorer than the favela’s better-heeled bohemians. Across from him is a couple, older, like someone’s parents but good-looking, speaking Spanish over the train’s roar and squeal. In a dry tone the man says, “So, really, you can see how very useful it all was,” and the woman—dark haired with small, freckled features—laughs, showing her gums, and Kern, helplessly, remembers a dark-haired woman sitting him down on a stool, working over his scalp with probing fingers, hunting down lice as the light faded in the window, the smell of something cooking. He remembers the house of white stone, the heat on white sand and the sharpness of her fear when she heard the wasp whine that he realizes, now, could only have been aerial drones, invisibly high overhead. He’s read that where the breath goes, the body follows, so he inhales, willing away the tension in his back, the heat around his eyes. There must have been some moment of final parting, but it’s gone, and all he remembers of the aftermath is walking north through the desert in the company of weary strangers, how the hard-faced, sunburned coyotes had cursed him, told him to go where he was wanted and tried to run him off, but it was better to be cursed than to have no place at all, and sometimes, after dark, the women gave him water. At night he’d gone off by himself, always half-awake, listening, lest the others go away. Near the border, the night sky was full of drones, their shadows gliding over the bright constellations as they fought their duels in the upper air, proxies in a war he’d never heard of. Minutes of stillness punctuated by the rapid flares of missiles firing like flurries of shooting stars, then detonations’ flashes illuminating the ragged contrails, and a few seconds later shock waves rumbling over the desert.
The train banks, centripetal force pushing him back into his seat, and now the woman across the aisle looks like no one, a stranger. He looks out the window—black, dust-furred infrastructure, leftover space, occasional flashes of graffiti passing too quickly to be attributed. A hint of salt on the air, and he thinks of the enormous pumps that keep the tunnels from flooding. The wheels clatter on the track, and all the other passengers seem to be asleep, or staring blankly into space, serenely confident the train will take them where they need to go. The woman laughs again; Kern closes his eyes, thinks that he must be in the present, that the present is gone once the thought has formed, that the present is a train that’s just leaving the station.
26
Nonexistent Prisons
Just the engine’s roar, the cone of light juddering over the black road before him, the dust in the light. Accelerator floored, the engine redlining, but despite the speed Thales feels like he’s floating, like nothing is changing or ever will till the car rounds a bend and there below him, all at once, the city’s sweep, its highways’ lights. For a moment he knows he’s dreaming but it slips away as his gaze settles on the spires of downtown where a gap among the towers implies some wide public square, the kind where freezing winds rush unimpeded over the treeless fields and the snow crunches underfoot as he makes his way toward the ice-choked creek to wait for a woman he doubts will ever really come, and now the bitter cold and the sepia stains on the Palladian facades tell him this isn’t Los Angeles at all but some other, more ancient city. In fact the buildings are rotting, reverting to geology under their furs of vegetation, and over these ruins rises a tower, black even in the dawn’s light, and his heart rises as his gaze follows it up to where its heights are lost in the celestial blue of morning, and the answers he needs are at its apex, if only he can reach it, and he’ll hunt it down the nights, and he’ll hunt it down the years, but he keeps losing his way among the cul-de-sacs and the endless winding streets, and it’s not long until he realizes he’s in the city’s derelict periphery, and hasn’t seen the tower in a long time, for the city is many cities, concentric and innumerable, and he’s forever lost the core.
No, he thinks, as he hastens past the shattered husks of strip malls and favelas like concrete cancers rising into the air, for there must be a way, as there’s always a way, and now he feels like a bird of prey, detached and intent, like pure perspective circling over the city, its thousands of square miles glittering vacantly in the sun, vast and unmeaning, but then he finds something in that ocean of emptiness, locks on, is falling …
It’s pure structure, what he’s found, and somehow mathematical, but he finds he can’t articulate it, not even a little, and it’s like the feeling of watching waves breaking, before the implant, a riot of form of which nothing can be said, and it’s terrifying, because his inarticulacy could be the effect of his injuries, which would mean he’s falling apart, so he compels himself to focus, and manages to tell himself that what he’s found is like a map, one showing what’s under the surface of things, and now his steps are echoing coldly in a windowless concrete corridor, some nameless liminal unfinished space, and he comes to an alcove lit by a flickering bulb in a dusty cage where EXIT TO CENTRAL is stenciled on a steel door in black letters. No handle, and there’s a screen by the door but it doesn’t wake. He presses his ear to the door, hears what could be static or maybe the sea. He steps back out into the corridor which branches and rebranches again and he’s wondering where he’s going when he finds another alcove with another door, this one marked SERVICE ACCESS and it opens at his touch …
The dream changes abruptly and he wonders if his implant is working again, because there in his mind is an expanse of frozen time, the memories of a young woman in a hotel room with her boyfriend, and he sees their interval all at once like a four-dimensional solid—there’s the stark winter light, how it changes by the second, the awkwardness of their lovemaking, how their pulses are visible in their flesh, the duvet changing shape under the incidental stresses, and he’s unmoved by their intimacy except in that it seems fitting that life should strive to chain forward through time. There are other spans of static memory and, there, a point of motion, a vortex drawing innumerable shards and splinters of memory and fitting them together like the pieces of a mosaic, and as he looks into its churning core there’s a flash impression of misery and determination and the streets of Los Angeles slipping past behind a town car’s windows. Now he sees another vortex (flash of verdant, manicured garden, its walls several stories high, security drones tracing lazy arcs in the air over the fountains) and then still another, which makes him flash on frozen time and a view of vortices and with a sense of rising through levels he gasps, sits up, is awake.
He’s sitting on the floor of an elevator in the St. Mark. Floors tick by—the elevator is ascending toward the penthouse, where his family has their suite. He’s not sure how he got here—did he have a syncope while he was trying to go home? The dream’s unease is still with him, and his fear of finding proof of his decline. “Major cranial ablation” had been the surgeon’s memorable turn of phrase. He thinks of the disturbed woman who’d accosted him, how she’d been radiant with unhappiness, and wonders how she wound up living on her own, apparently abandoned by her family; at least this hasn’t happened to him—he’ll find his mother, tell her what’s happening, see if she knows what to do.
The elevator stops, opens onto the verdure of the walled rooftop garden, its smell of its wet moss and earth. It’s like an opulent, manicured jungle. The path to their suite winds off under the branches.